Berkeley and Its Physics Heritage

I first sketch the settlement of Berkeley, California, the founding of the University of California at Berkeley, and the origin of its Department of Physics. I then discuss the pivotal role that Ernest O. Lawrence (1901–1958) and his invention and subsequent development of the cyclotron played in physics at Berkeley after his arrival there in 1928 through the Second World War and beyond. I close by commenting on the Lawrence Hall of Science, the educational center and science museum conceived as a living memorial to Lawrence.     

The National Synchrotron Light Source, Part II:The Bakeout

This is the second part of a two-part article about the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), the first facility designed and built specifically for producing and exploiting synchrotron radiation. The NSLS,a $24-million project conceived about 1970 and officially proposed in 1976, had its groundbreaking in 1978. Its construction was a key episode in Brookhaven’s history, in the transition of synchrotron radiation from a novelty to a commodity, and in the transition of synchrotron-radiation scientists from parasitic to autonomous researchers. In this part I cover the construction of the NSLS.The story of its construction illustrates many of the tensions and risks involved in building a large scientific facility in a highly politicized environment: risking a facility’s quality by underfunding it versus asking for more funding and risking not getting it; focusing on meeting time and budget promises that risk compromising machine performance versus focusing on performance and risking cancellation; and the pros and cons of a pragmatic versus an analytic approach to commissioning. Robert P. Crease is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, and historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory.     

In Appreciation

Leslie Foldy’s diminutive stature and modest demeanor gave little clue to the powerful intellect responsible for several significant advances in theoretical physics.Two were particularly important. His 1945 theory of the multiple scattering of waves laid out the fundamentals that most modern theories have followed (and sometimes rediscovered), while his work with Siegfried Wouthuysen on the nonrelativistic limit of the Dirac equation opened the way to a wealth of valuable insights. In this article we recall some of the milestones along Foldy’s path through a life in physics. Some of the anecdotes we report here were related to one of the authors (PLT) just before an event in 2000 celebrating Foldy’s 80th birthday, while others were told to us over the course of the nearly forty years during which we were colleagues. Still others were uncovered during the course of WJF’s research for his book, Physics at a Research University: Case Western Reserve 1830–1990 (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 2006). Other details were provided by Foldy’s widow, Roma. Philip L. Taylor is the Perkins Professor of Physics and Professor of Macromolecular Science and Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. William J. Fickinger is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Case Western Reserve University.     

Quirino Majorana’s Experiments on the Speed of Light and Gravitational Absorption

Quirino Majorana (1871–1957) was an outstanding Italian experimental physicist who investigated a wide range of phenomena during his long career in Rome,Turin, and Bologna. We focus on his experiments in Turin during 1916–1921 and in Bologna during 1921–1934 to test the validity of Albert Einstein’s postulate on the constancy of the speed of light and to detect gravitational absorption. These experiments required extraordinary skill, patience, and dedication, and all of them confirmed Einstein’s postulate and Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation to high precision. Had they not done so, Majorana’s fame among historians and physicists no doubt would be much greater than it is today. Giorgio Dragoni is Professor of History of Physics at the University of Bologna. Giulio Maltese is a Roman member of the Italian Society for the History of Physics and Astronomy. Luisa Atti is a Bolognese member of the Association for the Teaching of Physics.     

Science Sights in Utrecht

I provide a tour of Utrecht, focusing on its scientific highlights. I begin at the Dom or cathedral, Utrecht’s landmark, the Academy, and the University Museum, then proceed to the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute and astronomical observatory on the Sonnenborgh, and end with a visit to the Minnaert Building, the present home of the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Utrecht.     

Gerson Goldhaber: A Life in Science

I draw on my interviews in 2005–2007 with Gerson Goldhaber (1924–2010), his wife Judith, and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I discuss his childhood, early education, marriage to his first wife Sulamith (1923–1965), and his further education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1942–1947) and his doctoral research at University of Wisconsin at Madison (1947–1950). He then was appointed to an instructorship in physics at Columbia University (1950–1953) before accepting a position in the physics department at the University of California at Berkeley and the Radiation Laboratory (later the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, today the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), where he remained for the rest of his life. He made fundamental contributions to physics, including to the discovery of the antiproton in 1955, the GGLP effect in 1960, the psi particle in 1974, and charmed mesons in 1977, and to cosmology, including the discovery of the accelerating universe and dark energy in 1998. Beginning in the late 1960s, he also took up art, and he and his second wife Judith, whom he married in 1969, later collaborated in illustrating and writing two popular books. Goldhaber died in Berkeley, California, on July 19, 2010, at the age of 86.     

A Conversation with Robert F. Christy – Part II

Robert F. Christy, Institute Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, recalls his wartime work at Los Alamos on the critical assembly for the plutonium bomb (“the Christy bomb”); the Alamogordo test, July 16, 1945; the postwar concerns of ALAS (Association of Los Alamos Scientists); his brief return to the University of Chicago and move to Caltech; friendship with and later alienation from Edward Teller; work with Charles and Tommy Lauritsen and William A. Fowler in Caltech’s Kellogg Radiation Laboratory; Freeman Dyson’s Orion Project; work on the meson and RR Lyrae stars; fellowship at Cambridge University; 1950s Vista Project at Caltech; his opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative; and his post-retirement work for the National Research Council’s Committee on Dosimetry and on inertial-confinement fusion.     

Working group report: Dictionary of Large Hadron Collider signatures

We report on a plan to establish a ‘Dictionary of LHC Signatures’, an initiative that started at the WHEPP-X workshop in Chennai, January 2008. This study aims at the strategy of distinguishing 3 classes of dark matter motivated scenarios such as R-parity conserved supersymmetry, little Higgs models with T-parity conservation and universal extra dimensions with KK-parity for generic cases of their realization in a wide range of the model space. Discriminating signatures are tabulated and will need a further detailed analysis.      

The Physical Tourist

I provide a tour of Madrid, focusing especially on physical institutions that were created during the 19th and 20th centuries.These include the Astronomical Observatory close to the Prado Museum, which itself was conceived as a home for the Royal Academy of Sciences but became instead a world-famous art museum in 1819, leaving the Royal Academy of Sciences without a permanent home until 1866.The Laboratory of Physical Researches was created in 1910, and under the direction of Blas Cabrera (1878–1945), who also held a professorship at the Universidad Central, it fostered most of the Spanish research in physics at the time, in particular the famous spectroscopic researches of Miguel A. Catalán (1894–1957). Nearby were the so-called Transatlantico building and the Students’ Residence where Albert Einstein (1879–1955), for example, lectured in 1923, and which together continue to serve as a major cultural center in Madrid. Later, the physical laboratory was replaced by the National Institute of Physics and Chemistry, which was constructed with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and inaugurated in 1932. A new University City with its Faculty of Sciences also was constructed on the northwestern outskirts of Madrid, but almost all of its buildings were totally destroyed during the devastating Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. It was reconstructed after the war and became home, for example, to Spain’s first nuclear reactor, which achieved criticality in 1958.     

A Conversation with Robert F. Christy – Part I

Robert F. Christy, Institute Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, recalls his childhood in British Columbia; his undergraduate years at the University of British Columbia; his graduate work with J. Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley; and his work on the Manhattan Project, first with Enrico Fermi at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago and then as a member of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos.     

The Norwegian and the Englishman

I sketch the lives and work of the Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland (1867–1917) and the English mathematician Sydney Chapman (1888–1970), focusing particularly on Chapman’s controversy with Birkeland over the origin and development of auroras, a controversy that Chapman conducted with Birkeland for more than fifty years after Birkeland’s death. Sidney Borowitz is Professor Emeritus of Physics at New York University.     

Ettore Majorana’s Forgotten Publication on the Thomas-Fermi Model

We analyze the forgotten communication of Ettore Majorana (1906–1938?) on the Thomas-Fermi statistical model of the atom, which he presented on December 29, 1928, during the XXII General Meeting of the Italian Physical Society in Rome, and which was published in Il Nuovo Cimento, the Society’s journal, in 1929. His communication was not mentioned subsequently in any of the numerous publications of Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) and his group in Rome, nor in any of the later accounts of Majorana’s life and work. We place Majorana’s contribution within the context of contemporary research on the subject, point out its influence on the final formulation of the Thomas-Fermi statistical model by Fermi and Edoardo Amaldi (1908–1989) in 1934, and discuss Majorana’s other scientific contributions before his mysterious disappearance in 1938. Francesco Guerra is Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” His main fields of research are quantum-field theory, statistical mechanics of complex systems, and the history of nuclear physics. Nadia Robotti is Professor of History of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Genoa. Her main fields of research are the history of atomic physics, quantum mechanics, and nuclear physics.     

Quenched! The ISABELLE Saga, II

This is the second part of a two-part article about ISABELLE, a colliding-beam accelerator conceived in 1971, officially approved in 1978, partially constructed, and terminated in 1983. I cover here the period from ISABELLE’s groundbreaking in 1978 to its termination in 1983. I treat the problems with ISABELLE’s superconducting magnets, the steps by which the problems became clear within the laboratory and to the outside, the initial failure of the laboratory administration to take forceful steps, conflicts with Fermilab, the alternate magnet projects, the repeated missing of openings that eventually used up the window of opportunity. I cover Robert Palmer’s successful creation of an alternate magnet that used Brookhaven’s existing tooling and techniques and provided (too late) a technical solution to the project’s problems, and the name change to the Colliding Beam Accelerator (CBA). I also discuss the failure of the machine to hold the physics community’s interest, and the project’s termination.     

Hans Bethe, My Teacher

I sketch my experiences with Hans Bethe (1906–2005) as a teacher at Cornell University, beginning with my doctoral studies in 1961 and continuing with my work with him on a quantum-mechanics textbook. Hans Bethe, My Teacher: Based on my talk at the Bethe Memorial,Aspen Center for Physics,Aspen,CO, in August 2006. Roman Jackiw: Roman Jackiw is Jerrold Zacharias Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.     

In Memoriam

I sketch the rich life and multifaceted work of Philip Morrison (1915–2005), from his early life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and higher education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley, to his contributions to the Manhattan Project, his research at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after the war, his subsequent political activity on behalf of nuclear disarmament, his role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and his enormous influence as an educator, public speaker, and writer. A.P. French is Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.     

Richard Gans: The First Quantum Physicist in Latin America

Richard Gans (1880–1954) was appointed Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Physics of the National University of La Plata,Argentina, in 1912 and published a series of papers on quantum physics between 1915 and 1918 that marked him as the first quantum physicist in Latin America. I set Gans’s work within the context of his education and career in Germany prior to 1912 and his life and work in Argentina until 1925, as well as the foundation of the Institute of Physics of the National University of La Plata in 1906–1909 and its subsequent development by Emil Bose (1874–1911). I conclude by commenting on Gans’s life after he returned to Germany in 1925 and then immigrated once again to Argentina in 1947.     

Theoretical LSP detection rates for dark-matter detectors

Low-energy structure of the dark-matter detector nuclei ⁷¹Ga, ⁷³Ge and ¹²⁷I has been studied by using the nuclear shell model. The calculations have been done in realistic model spaces by using renormalized microscopic two-body interactions. The resulting ground states have been used to calculate theoretical predictions for detection rates of the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) in experiments studying elastic scattering of the LSP’s from atomic nuclei. Presented by T.S. Kosmas at the Workshop on calculation of double-beta-decay matrix elements (MEDEX’05), Corfu, Greece, September 26–29, 2005.     

ICPAQGP2001: Conference summary

I review recent progress in ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions, and the connection of this field to modern QCD theory of deconfinement and/or chiral symmetry restoration. The talks at this Conference have shown a convergence of data and theory as far as the CERN SPS investigations at √s = 17 GeV are concerned; the parton-hadron phase boundary seems now located atT = 170 ± 10 MeV. New data from RHIC and direct photon production results from CERN have been shown that point out the field’s future direction: analysis of partonic matter atT > 200 MeV. Astrophysics analysis was shown to be linked crucially to further theoretical progress with non-perturbative QCD.